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Greeting cards routinely tell us everybody deserves love. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time.

Zadie Smith

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Zadie Smith
Age: 49
Born: 1975
Born: October 27
Essayist
Novelist
Writer
London
England
Zadie Adeline Smith
Cards
Clean
Deserve
Everybody
Water
Greeting
Tell
Routinely
Time
Greetings
Love
Deserves

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Anyone over the age of thirty catching a bus can consider himself a failure.
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You don't have favourites among your children, but you do have allies.
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And now the moment. Such a moment has a peculiar character. It is brief and temporal indeed, like every moment it is transient as all moments are it is past, like every moment in the next moment. And yet it is decisive, and filled with the eternal. Such a moment ought to have a distinctive name let us call it the Fullness of Time.
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The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.
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She wore her sexuality with an older woman's ease, and not like an awkward purse, never knowing how to hold it, where to hang it, or when to just put it down.
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I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.
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No fiction, no myths, no lies, no tangled webs - this is how Irie imagined her homeland. Because homeland is one of the magical fantasy words like unicorn and soul and infinity that have now passed into language.
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In a whisper he began begging for—and, as the sun set, received—the concession people always beg for: a little more time.
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A trauma is something one repeats and repeats, after all, and this is the tragedy of the Iqbals--that they can't help but reenact the dash they once made from one land to another, from one faith to another, from one brown mother country into the pale, freckled arms of an imperial sovereign.
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It's not in good taste to have talking ghosts in a grown-up novel.
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In the end, your past is not my past and your truth is not my truth and your solution - is not my solution.
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Novels are not about expressing yourself, they're about something beautiful, funny, clever and organic. Self-expression ? Go and ring a bell in a yard if you want to express yourself.
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When I see my friends engaging in a Twitter war for an afternoon, I think that would destroy me for a month.
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I don't actually believe in the extension of consciousness after death.
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I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human — I only love to be so.
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You must live life with the full knowledge that your actions will remain. We are creatures of consequence.
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Rarely does one see a squirrel tremble.
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It's a funny thing about rap, that when you say 'I' into the microphone, it's like a public confession. It's very strange.
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